WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY? AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS!

WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY? AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 3, 2009


A WRITER WRITES FROM GERMANY:

Jim,

We are all different in our ways of looking at life and our expectations. Obviously some people never are content and will not be assertive enough to make the effort to make a difference. You cannot change it!

Manfred

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Manfred,

We are different but the difference is more an artificial than a real factor, and the reason I write as I do.

We are different genetically, but I think that is a factor that is exaggerated more than proven. Why is it some succeed and so many others fail? Why is 80 percent of the work done by 20 percent of the people? I believe it is a battle between nurture versus nature.

Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, who wrote the wonderful book "The Soul of a New Machine" (1982), about a small group of engineers that built a computer and then were disbanded like confetti, has written a new book "Strength in What Remains" (2009).

It is about a student who took flight through Burundi and Rwanda under harrowing conditions, arrived in New York City, speaking no English, no contacts, no connections with just $200, and went on to become a doctor graduating from Columbia, one of the best schools in the United States.

You would say he was exceptional, and he was, but I believe that spirit exists in all of us, maybe not a soaring flame, but perhaps only a pilot light, yet it can be nurtured into a brilliance that otherwise might not exist.

Just as I believe freedom is endemic to the human spirit I think the will to take hold of our innate talents is there, but sometimes the mountain is too high for us to make the effort.

In Venezuela, Caracas in particular, children in the most impoverished neighborhoods are studying classical music with instruments provided by the government.

There are some 220 such centers throughout the nation with more than 400,000 young people participating. Over one million children since 1975 have participated in this program, which grows leaps and bounds each year. It has been found to assuage crime and violence, gangs and prostitution.

Those that prove the most talented perform in a national orchestra. It is likely that it is less than 20 percent of those who participate.

It is beautiful and wonderful to see a nation lift the spirit up of the people. Nothing is more beautiful than classical music, nothing more in the rhythm of what I'm trying to describe.

Many people are stuck and need a lift. They need a chance to do something worthwhile. They need stimulation consistent with their natural talent, talent perhaps far removed from music. Music in the parlance of chemistry is simply the catalyst.

Be always well,

Jim

* * *

WRITER FROM GERMANY RESPONDS:

Jim,

I observe more and more people who are not driven to excel in their jobs because they say it is not worth the hassle. They are content with less money, less image and no responsibility.

To view it from another perspective, why is it not all people are eager to achieve in sports? It is because they don't care. They feel they are not born to do such exhausting things. And we accept it.

Why not accept this kind of attitude in professional life?

The only thing I consider wrong is that people not enduring the pain to produce want to get the same benefits and gratification. This is what the new political correctness is leading to.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but this is how I see it.

Best regards

Manfred

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you for your views. There is no right or wrong to a point of view. It puts us in touch with the way we think.

Your response does trigger several thoughts.

Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983), the German-American longshoreman philosopher, experienced blindness when he was a small boy with his eyesight returning miraculously in his late teens. With little formal education, once he had eyesight, he had hunger for the word.

He went to the library and checked out the biggest book with the smallest print and read it cover-to-cover. It was a collection of essays by the French essayist and philosopher Montesquieu (1689 – 1755). He was baptized with the fire of words and ideas.

Hoffer liked physical work because it gave him ample time to think without the drudgery of contiually worrying about senseless bureaucratic tasks. He wrote many books, and I’ve read them all, but find his first, “The True Believer” (1951) enough to maintain his reputation for ages, identifying the "herd mentality" of mass social movements. The herd Hoffer showed surrendered its will to belong and for it became self-alienated.

The media, national politicians, religious gurus and corpoate leaders orchestrate this symphony as individualism has become increasingly an empty suit in a progressively one-dimensional society. That said we are stuck with what we are.

* * *

The German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) once said, “When you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan as if composed by a novelist.” He went on to say, “Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.”

It is the WILL that I attempt to address.

Imagine the difficulty in determining your will if you are always looking for answers “outside” and spending little time exploring the wonders “within.”

It is possible perhaps even probable that more people than ever are living vicarious lives through other people’s careers, achievements and experiences without sensing their own.

This is the product of a celebrity culture.

What is most damaging about a celebrity culture is not celebrities. They are tinsel on a Christmas tree. It is that people become spectators to life and live through their heroes and not their own experiences.

* * *

We in the West, it would seem to me, have a moral responsibility to contribute our talent and not sit on it, especially since over three billion souls on the globe live on less than $1,000 a year. These people exist without proper shelter, sanitation, safe drinking water and enough food and clothing to keep body and soul together or free from crippling diseases.

Tuberculosis is rampant in the slums of Mumbai, which is unresponsive to any available drugs. Children are dying.

We in the West have too many floaters too many dreamers who dream of flying planes and owning fast cars as if life is a movie of celluloid dimensions. You say it is okay to be floaters, and I agree if we don’t have to bail them out or carry them into their old age.

* * *

What took the struggle out of life, the embarrassment, and the failure? I can tell you what I think. It was the social engineering idea of “self-esteem,” where little Johnny and little Susie could not have their delicate psyches wounded with a little reality, but must be rewarded however they performed saving them from struggle, embarrassment or failure in school or play.

This has resulted in there being few adults among the baby boomer generation, or the generations that have followed. We have a society essentially suspended in terminal adolescence, reacting to rather than anticipating challenges.

Tell a little girl in Afghanistan about “self-esteem,” a person who hungers to be educated, and knows every day she steps out of her home and walks to school she may be killed on the way or blown up in the schoolhouse by the Taliban because women are not meant to be educated.

* * *

You mentioned athletes. I was a four-sport athlete, not in my dreams, as many men I have met in my adult life prove to be, but a person who “paid the price,” as we used to call it, with rugged practices in football, constant laps and sprints in track, practices and games during holidays in basketball, and the same in baseball. We were all high school athletes, and if you didn’t perform you didn’t make the team. It was that simple.

I never had any illusions of being a professional athlete, but I do know this. People with whom I played who turned professional could visualize themselves as professionals before it happened. The vision came before the reality. Beyond that, “they paid the price” by working out year around to perfect their talents, taking injuries and setbacks, and failures in stride.

* * *

There are two words critical to this discussion: being and becoming.

Being is. Consequently, it is all about struggle, pain, disappointment, failure and ultimately some level of satisfaction, success and achievement.

I happened to have had the privilege of being in classes in high school with people of “being.” They were going somewhere. They didn’t brag about “never taking a book home,” or “never reading a book,” or implying “school work was so easy it came as if by osmosis.” They worked. They sacrificed. They paid attention. They stayed focus. And I can tell you today, nearly sixty years later, they have all done very well, “thank you very much.”

People who are obsessed with “becoming” are floaters, dreamers, never paying the price, never buckling down, looking for the angles, seeing themselves as “cleverer than the next dude by half,” and they always come up short. They are looking for breaks rather than making them.

It is a cliché but true: luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

* * *

You may remember this. Four directors of Honeywell Europe Ltd. were having dinner in a restaurant in Amsterdam in 1988. The conversation came around to what each director would like to be if he or she had his or her druthers. Remember?

One director said he’d like to be a radio personality and singer, another said she would like to be a newspaper reporter and columnist, another said he would like to be a farmer, and I said, “I am a writer.”

That was more than twenty years ago, but I saw myself as a writer then, not in terms of success but in terms of mental set. I didn’t say I want to become a writer because becoming then as now had nothing to do with it. Like everyone else at that table, I was working for a living, which was a necessary but not sufficient condition to my fulfillment. Besides, I can recall the conversation that night as if it were yesterday.

Be always well,

Jim